Chelsea 2014 – Review in pictures

This year for the first time I strolled through to the entrance gates to Chelsea Flower Show early on Monday morning sporting a shiny Press Pass, courtesy of the RHS. How delightfully odd it was to have uncontested views of the main show gardens from any angle, odder still to walk through the near empty Floral Marquee with only the booms of TV cameras and photographers on stepladders to navigate around.

Below is a review of the main show gardens, but if I had to sum up the feel of the whole show, I’d say Chelsea has its tail feathers up in a confident post-recession mood. Five years ago Sarah Eberle created a hugely amusing ‘Monopoly’ garden for a sacked banker, complete with defensive urban moat and a model yacht. This year she created a fresh ‘garden’ for Gucci, all floral extravaganza and bling (damn, can’t find a picture…).

As for the shopping, I presume you are short of truly original ideas for adorning your house? A seashell encrusted wall-mounted T-rex head should do the trick. Or how about a rosebud studded grand piano, topped off with a similarly embellished gorilla? You get the drift. Times have changed.

I started with the best of intentions – a careful study of each show garden, camera and notebook in hand. A couple of so called ‘celebs’ caught my eye, but it was easy to resist pausing to photograph a somewhat plump and orange Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen and a heavily made up Gloria Honeyford. I focused on the task in hand and admired Cleve West’s restrained planting on his Persian-inspired Paradise Garden. I love that he leaves space for plants to express themselves individually, avoiding that Chelsea-esque style of packing plants in improbably close. I love the asymmetry of the foreground planting and the subtle colour combination of Stipa gigantea with Asphodeline lutea. The overall effect is a delicate, airy tapestry.

I rather liked the Homebase garden ‘A Time to Reflect’ for the Alzheimer’s Society, with its multiple paths, open planting, gorgeously curvaceous wooden benches and shady, well proportioned pavillion. All the stone was the same colour, but with different textures: smooth paving, walling, natural rocks and gravel.

Apart from the crowds, the other feature missing from press day is the awards. This means you can’t glance at the medal card and then nod sagely, feigning to know what it was the judges found to their liking or otherwise. You have no option but to gauge each garden for yourself and wait until Tuesday to confirm or confound your judgement. I thought the fiddly paving and resulting gappy planting might cost it a gold medal. I was wrong.

I gazed at the Brand Alley Renaissance garden for a very long time, struggling to find something positive to say about it other than ‘big oblong pond’. The planting on the right bore no relation to the rest of it and the pavilion at the end seemed too small for the garden. Witheringly, Anne Wareham spotted that the pavilion housed a collection of red pelargoniums, as if ‘someone had tidied up outside and shoved them in there overnight’. It got a bronze medal. A shame for the designer and sponsor but a little reassuring all the same.

Well, just shows you what I know, or clearly don’t. To my astonishment and that of many people around me on Tuesday it got a Silver-gilt medal. Not a gold and certainly not best in show. As a new exhibitor Mattie was thrilled anyway, but truly that seemed very wrong indeed. The judges had explained to him that the brief didn’t match the garden closely enough. Been there, done that. I fully understand, but even so….

Here’s a closeup of the sculptural feature at the far end – to me it seemed faintly reminiscent of an abstract crocodile or a fossilised dinosaur turd.  I’m sure the brief explained what it was and what, if anything, it was for, but as the garden lacked seats I think I would have wanted to sit on it. Sacrilege, I’m sure.

The Cloudy Bay garden by Andrew Wilson and Gavin McWilliam offered up some of the loveliest planting in the show, with purple and violet hues among Festuca amethystina in the foreground, through warm reds and oranges to lemons and whites at the back.

And along the back of the garden, vertical blackened tree sections, as if struck by lightning framed this lovely sculpture in one of the most striking images of the show. Apparently the sculpture represented the wave form of the word ‘light’ spoken. I’d like to have read the brief to understand how it all interconnected – the choice of plants, the graded colours, the blackened wood and the sculpture. And the amateur photographer in me rued that I couldn’t quite see the whole form of the sculpture through the narrow gap. But no matter, the overall effect was gorgeous and it won a well-earned Silver-gilt medal.

Youthful designers shone at Chelsea this year and none shone brighter than Hugo Bugg, winner of Young Designer of the Year at Tatton Show and now the youngest ever gold medal winner at Chelsea. I had no advance doubts about the colour of his medal. OK, so the river of blue irises won’t flower for long, but it was a lovely visual effect. And the overall design and planting was very strong indeed. I loved the triangular motif running through it.

Stoke-on-Trent occupied the prime spot under the TV cameras with a stunning pair of steel water feature arches. Huge orbs of the town’s famed painted pottery nestled amid opulent planting, like giant exotic birds’ eggs. Apparently the ratepayers of Stoke-on-Trent are baulking at the cost, but if you’re going to showcase your gaff at Chelsea you have to do it well or not at all. I thought they did it brilliantly.

And this, folks, is where my attempt at semi-serious study of Chelsea fell apart. Accosted by an 8 foot robot by the name of Titan, I gazed into his steely eyes, he walked towards me and broke into song… I laughed so hard I forgot I was filming it. Here’s the recording. It’s a big file. Don’t try and download it, if, like me, your internet connection is at the end of a bit of wet string.

And from a metal man to a leather horse. Ah, the delights of Press Day. I haven’t seen the play, but I recognised Warhorse as it came towards me, around the No Man’s Land garden. See how it looks as if the horse is pulling away from the groom and he’s trying to hold it back? Clever that. It’s plainly a puppet, you can see the legs of the people inside it. But it’s much more plainly a horse, a huge, wilful, powerful horse.

Look just to the left of the horse’s muzzle. Yep, that’s Michael Parkinson. And he’s talking to…

…Piers Morgan. And the horse knows exactly who he is and is giving him a good snorting. The poor groom was struggling to keep control of him.

I watched Jeremy Paxman read Wilfred Owen’s unflinching poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. The small crowd around me took a few pictures at first, then stopped and listened respectfully as he made sure, with every clearly enunciated syllable, that we got the full picture. I don’t know whether it was an accident of timing, or disinterest, but the TV cameras missed all the readings I saw, including the ones by Stephen Fry, Caroline Quentin and Rowan Atkinson.  That was an omission, I felt, given all the trivia that did get covered in 15 hours of TV time.

Apologies for the shameless name dropping. Here’s the mound. Complete with the three aforementioned poetry readers…